A few years ago, a number kept calling our house while we were out, but didn’t leave a message.  Finally we were around one time when they called, and it was Taylor Construction looking to drum up some business.  I told them very clearly that even if we needed construction services, they were now off our list.  I don’t deal with companies that cold call.

Today they went further — a home visit!  There’s nothing I like more than people trying to sell me stuff, unsolicited, while we’re getting the girls ready for bed.  Just so it’s clear, they’re still off the list…

So what’s a company to do?  It’s simple — be able to be found.  If I want to hire a company to do some construction work at the house, make sure you’re the first company I find.  In my case, that would mean Google.  Let’s say we wanted to get new windows for the house.  I’d probably start by searching for something like “marietta window replacement”.  They’re not in the first 100 results.

Looking at their site (no, I’m not linking to it), it seems they are targeting the word “Atlanta” instead of any suburb, which kind of makes sense.  Ok, so let’s try “atlanta window replacement”.  No dice — still not in the top 100.

The problems with their site are fairly basic things.  Maybe if they read my SEO blog rather than cold calling and door-to-door soliciting, they’d be in better shape in Google…

On an old blog of mine, I expressed frustration about Goodyear competing against itself.  In that case, it was radio ads that essentially said “every Goodyear sucks except for ours“.

To be honest, we’ve been pleased with Goodyear.  There are two locations near us, both of which do pretty good work.  The problem is that they compete against each other too much.  The image to the right shows two postcards, one from each location, that we received today.

In the past, the pricing has been even more varied.  You would think for something like this they’d at least have their prices be the same, but I guess not.  This just seems silly to me.

We had a fun time getting dinner tonight.  We ordered a couple of meals from “China House” (about 2 miles away from our house) at around 6:00.  We were told “under 45 minutes”.  45 minutes would have been kind of late for us, but we figured it’d be alright.  At 6:50, we gave them a call to see where the food was.

“The driver is on the way to your house, but rush hour traffic is bad.”  What?  Less than one mile up East Piedmont Road is “rush hour”.  C’mon!

Still, we waited.  At about 7:05 we called again, this time to cancel.  He assured us that the driver was almost there, but we canceled anyhow.  No apologies, nothing.  Quite a bit of silence on their end, which was quite odd.

Even more interesting was at about 7:20 (after Kel had already made some pancakes for dinner – score!), the driver called to make sure he had the right address.  Ha!  He seemed quite put off that we had canceled the order a while ago.

Needless to say, we won’t be calling them again anytime soon.